Making sense of our ongoing social catastrophe. (An Orthosphere blog.)

6 posts categorized "Anecdotes & Aphorisms"

August 12, 2014

I don't know why, but the way leftists write fascinates me. I've explored left-wing lexicography before, and I recall penning one post I can't seem to find now (perhaps I never actually published it) pondering if there's some kind of book that people are given upon their induction into the leftist... illuminati or whatever.

I don't mean merely the themes they tend to talk about, but the actual styles in which they write. There is just such a style, and it's qualitatively different from the way right-wingers write. I think it says a lot about the idea that attitudes are formed by personality traits, or rather that certain personality traits predispose people to be attracted to particular sets of attitudes. Accordingly, I was hardly surprised about Charles Johnson's remorseless shift to the left the last few years; he'd always written like a leftist, with the characteristic snark and sarcasm, the pained efforts to sound clever, the insufferable moral supremacy -- he was really just going home.

So I was naturally interested in the wrathful outpouring over at Jezebel in response to Roosh's creating a new meme blasting the vapidity and general nastiness (body, mind, and soul) of American women -- a meme that the ladies at Jezebel have, perhaps unwittingly, only reinforced. Emotionality strips people of their intellectual pretensions, I think; it boils them down to who they really are, how they really think. Their rage speaks to me.

First, their woeful misreading of the average IMF reader is pretty noteworthy. Ms. Ryan evidently thinks they're a crew of sexually frustrated self-styled "nice guys" who, in their bitterness, resort to rationalizations about the undesirability of American women. I'm sure that's true of at least some IMF readers, but they hardly seem to be a majority. Many, certainly, were "nice guys" once, a long time ago. Life experience changed that, as it often does -- not only the life experience of being rejected romantically for being a nerdy suck-up but also the experience of sexual success due to repudiating that suck-uppery. I certainly don't think most any of them would call themselves "nice guys" anymore, much less are they bepimpled virginal basement-dwellers. I think of them more as the guys from Swingers (who hang out, eat pizza, and play SNES games for fun) than the guys from... you know, The Big Bang Theory or something, who have scheduled weekly Halo tournaments and actually attach in-group status to the outcome of those games. So although they may be bitter, few of their other descriptors actually stick to the IMF readership; for the most part, they're simply bizarrely inaccurate and wholly oblivious to this fact.

I suppose I can't fault Ms. Ryan for not grasping the nuances of IMF readers' personality traits. She's clearly not a regular reader. People tend to fall back on reliable memes when they are unsure how to proceed; but it's important that this is the meme she chose. Assuming that everyone who doesn't like you must not like you because you're better than them is very telling, indeed. I'll leave it up to you to decide what, exactly, it says about them.

There is, of course, the obligatory reference to somebody's "pointless existence." People have been using that phrase so long now it kind of grates on my cornea just to see it in text. Pointless existence, sometimes rendered meaningless existence, and usually welded into a sentence containing some variant of the word justify. Ugh. For people generally so enthralled to the fashions of the day, you think they'd grab a thesaurus rather than trot out cliched crap. Why not glitz it up and write, I dunno, rationalize your purposeless state of being or something?

I count the appearance of some variant of "racist" five times and "misogynist" three times, both in the main post and in the comments section. I'm frankly surprised they didn't appear more frequently. Of course, nothing about the meme is racist. "American," after all, is a nationality, not a race -- at any rate the argument is that the culture of American femininity is defective (which belies the claim of misogyny, too). Nor is it racist or misogynist to claim that women of some other race (or nationality; the commenters refer to women of eastern European descent, but again, eastern European is not a race) are preferable to American women, as, again, the argument is that Asians and eastern Europeans exhibit more desirable cultural traits, not that they're some kind of racially pure übermenschen. At any rate, our friend Inigo said it best.

And finally, the sarcasm. It abounds. It's right there in the title and appears four or five times in the body of the (rather short) post itself. I often think there's a peculiar psychology to sarcasm. As a means of humor, it's wholly ineffective (I once used the term sarcasmosis to describe the act of sucking all the humor out of a situation by means of excessive sarcasm). It literally consists of nothing but saying back to someone what they just said in a slightly more nasally voice. Any babboon capable of mashing a keyboard with his balled-up fists could, given sufficient time, emulate sarcasm with a startling degree of accuracy. But Ferdinand Bardamu has already pointed out how unfunny and blindingly literal their memes are, and I don't think they're stupid enough not to realize it, which means their sarcasm serves some other purpose. I've often felt, although I have no evidence that this is the case, that sarcasm is a response to feelings of oppression and hopelessness. The sarcastic person feels ground down by the weight of the world, and resorts to petty verbal sniping at those who complain about woes that, in their mind, pale in comparison to their own. I suppose being in thrall to an ideology that harps endlessly about unjust power dynamics, the oppressive of social structures, the futility of nonrevolutionary movements, etc., would turn me into a bitter, black-hearted harridan, too.

Before anyone asks, no, I have no plans to examine the lexicography of the right. For one thing, being a right-winger myself, I can't get the perspective on it necessary to write a good one. (To paraphrase Machiavelli, you see the mountain best from the bottom of the valley; you see the valley best from the top of the mountain). And second, I don't really read mainstream right-wing blogs. Frankly, they bore the hell out of me.

February 10, 2014

There isn't one. God is dead and there's no point to anything, so comfort yourself with some arbitrary and irrational delusion until your life winds down to its inevitable and meaningless end. Unless that delusion involves religion, in which case you're a dumb bigot fundie homophobe bastard.

February 08, 2014

Recently, my girlfriend took me to a Vietnamese restaurant. I'd been to one before but never tried what was apparently the staple dish: pho, a soup dish of beef, noodles, and various greens in a thin broth. Her description of it sounded wonderful. But what was placed in front of me was a stinking, fetid bowl of animal waste, reeking to high heaven. Girlfriend loved it and happily devoured hers, but no sooner did I put a slice of beef to my tongue than my eyes began to water. It tasted antiseptic, like meat that had been deep-fried in a vat of hand soap. I promptly swallowed (without so much as chewing) and pushed the bowl away, touching not one more bite.

Growing up, I'd always been a picky eater. I was the kid who would sit at the table for hours, sullenly pushing his food around on the plate because he couldn't stomach one more bite. (Parents were not very understanding in this regard). The worst dish, the one I could tolerate least, was mother's chicken gumbo. I've simmered down a lot as I've grown older, and some things I once couldn't tolerate I now love -- sauerkraut is right up there. But keep the gumbo away from me.

Anyway, girlfriend and I sat and tried to figure out what the problem was with the pho. Our dishes both tasted exactly the same, or at least both tasted the same to each of us -- good for her, nauseous for me. Clearly, I was reacting to something in the recipe that she wasn't.

Cilantro lovers say it has a refreshing, lemony or limelike flavor that complements everything from guacamole to curry. It's a key ingredient in a range of ethnic cuisines, including Mexican, Indian and Chinese.

But few foods elicit such heated negative reactions. Many people say it tastes soapy, rotten or just plain vile. Just a whiff of it is enough to make them push away their plates. ...

Cilantro haters complain that it is showing up in unexpected places. Erin Hollingsworth, a 26-year-old editor at an environmental Web site, says she detected it in a bowl of Manhattan clam chowder she ordered at a New York lunch place.

"I thought to myself: 'No, it couldn't be. Really. Is this a joke? Who puts cilantro in Manhattan clam chowder?'" she wrote in her blog, "I Hate Cilantro: A Look Inside the Life of a Cilantro Hater and Food Lover." Ms. Hollingsworth says she now lies to waiters, telling them she's allergic to cilantro. "People take you seriously that way," she says.

Could also explain why I hate pico de gallo, which tastes the same to me.

February 04, 2014

This is the key issue: how to find or create a spiritual ‘modus vivendi’ that allows one to be ‘in the modern world but not of it’? This is the terrible spiritual position of the individual embedded in modernity, for, if a normative civilization quite naturally provides supports for the remembrance of God and the spiritual life, the modern world substitutes, in practical fact, these supports with impediments. In effect, instead of swimming with the spiritual current of a normative civilization, the individual must swim against the current of the modern world if he is to escape spiritual ruination.

As Don Colacho – whose aphorisms are available once again – critically observes, “Today the individual must gradually reconstruct inside himself the civilized universe that is disappearing around him.” [http://don-colacho.blogspot.com/2010/10/2046.html]

There is a twofold effort that is required: intellectual, in that one must see through the errors of the modern conception, and build, for oneself at least, an understanding of things that relates back to the Transcendent and to spiritual realities; operative, in that one should try, in whatever partial and intermittent manner, to orient one’s daily life toward prayer and the remembrance of God. Modern life is inherently centrifugal, scattering one’s attention to the periphery; the task before one is to return, again and again, to the Center, to quite literally ‘re-collect’ oneself before God.

As Frithjof Schuon recommends, “In short, one must live ‘in a little garden of the Holy Virgin,’ without unhealthy curiosity and without ever losing sight of the essential content and goal of life. That is ‘holy poverty’ or ‘holy childlikeness’; it is also, so to speak, ‘holy monotony’.... dominated by the proximity of the sacred, and on the margin from the uproar of this lower world.... This seems obvious, but most believers take no account of it.”

@Kristor – “Just think if AIDS was transmitted that way. Think we’d have AIDS colonies? You betcha we would.”

Actually, we probably wouldn’t, not in Britain anyway. And this is a measure of the pervasive dishonesty of our society. The ruling elites would very probably deny AIDS was contangious, and claim that the people were dying from something else – discrimination probably.

When AIDS arrived in Britain, and the government was running terrifyng TV averts about icebergs of disease, and people very high up were genuinely concerned that there might be a wiping-out of the younger generation – nonetheless clear and vital facts were deliberately concealed from the public.

In particular it was stated again and again that *everyone* was at risk, nobody was safe. Later it emerged that hetero-sexually transmitted AIDS was almost 100 percent confined to a very small group of recent immigrants from certain parts of Africa, almost entirely living in London.

This was a high risk population, the government knew, but the UK public was never allowed this information, and was indeed fed upon lies – presumably some people caught AIDS and some died as a result…

It was an early example of the politically correct airport ‘security’ policy, where anyone *could* be a terrorist (even if such people never have been terrorist so far in the history of the world); so the checks are ‘random’ (yeah…) and include detailed spot searches of young children travelling in families (it happened to us!), 85 year old grandmothers etc. Meanwhile, known and obvious high risk groups waltz-through ‘security’.

Our ruling elites are serious about PC. Societal annihiliation from leprosy would, for them, be a price they were prepared to pay.

Yet it cannot be said that this is acting nobly, stoically, on principle; because they would lie about the reality – lie to themselves and lie to others.

If the elites were to say clearly – leprosy is an incurable and terrible disease which is contagious – nonetheless we should allow lepers to live among us as equals because discrimination is the worst of evils; and the result will probably be that eventually nearly everybody will have leprosy – including you and me and our children; but that we should nonetheless do this because we should act by the highest principles of morality and the highest principle is non-discrimination…

If the PC elite would say something like that, they that would be respect-worthy, so far as it went. To suffer, deliberately, in pursuit of high goals is noble.

Because that would lead to questions of where this specific non-discriminative principle of morality comes from, and why it should be primary; and to this question they have no answer, because there is no answer.

But the ruling elites don’t, they don’t ever state honestly the truth as it is known – not even to themselves in private.

They would say that the threat of leprosy was exaggerated, mistakes in diagnosis were made, it was possible to make transmission unlikely, maybe some people were resistant, that it is actually curable, that the problem with leprosy is exaggerated and most due to prejudice against people who look strange, that it was a disease mostly of the poor and some ethnicities – they would raise up a dust-storm of psuedo-doubts and red herrings until real leprosy had disappeared and been redefined as being an *arbitrary label* imposed due to prejudice.

This isn't something we have to deal with a lot around here, but it bugs me nevertheless. Recently, a friend brought up the issue of homosexuality (the context was a revolting photograph she found online which I will not share, but which involved a half-nude gay man at a pride parade embracing an open apostate apologizing for Christianity's treatment of gays) and criticized the Christian take on the issue, on the grounds that it's inconsistent with Christian love. I've previously attacked this is a misrepresentation of caritas and what it means; simply put, love in this sense means not only expecting but demanding the best of the object of that love, which is naturally inconsistent with scandalous and reprehensible sexual behavior. Would you be content with your wife or daughter becoming a prostitute or a drug addict just because it makes her "happy"? No; such would be beneath her. The internal logic of interpersonal love is such that it demands excellence of its object.

Anyway, the discussion was polite and brief and ended with her saying we'd have to agree to disagree but that she respected my opinion. The subject was dropped and we went on talking about less divisive things. But it wasn't the first time I'd heard that formulation as a means of ending a discussion: I respect your opinion.

I respect your opinion! As if the subject of the conversation were whether my "opinion" was worthy of your respect. As if it were about you and me and not the truth. As if I were seeking your approval. It is a trope typical of the mind that can apprehend no truths beyond a conflict of two sovereign wills, moving at random throughout space and carefully agreeing to orchestrate their respective speeds and trajectories so as to avoid collision. At least the muscular and aggressive atheist/liberal/modern is acknowledging the existence of transcendent truth (albeit for no reason, no sound motivation, no good end, and in rank contrast to his own irrational nihilistic prejudices) when he declares, "You're wrong, and a jerk to boot." I might not say the same thing, but I don't pretend that my enemies' opinions are entitled to respect, especially when they're wrong on matters of grave importance and when their "arguments" amount to recycled cliches born of ignorance. There is no right to falsehood and error, after all, which is perhaps the one thing we and our neurotic dumbass enemies can agree on.

(Obviously my friend didn't mean it this way; it's just one of those things people feel the need to say, I guess. It probably dates from that long-ago age when liberalism was actually concerned with niceness instead of mere round-the-clock sodomy-at-any-price. At any rate, I object to the formulation itself, not the motivations of the speaker).